The president of the Catalan Football Federation (FCF), Joan Soteras, has defended himself against accusations of irregularities in the elections for the presidency of the entity made by the candidate who came in second, Juanjo Isern. The elections held on February 13 have been challenged before the Catalan Sports Court (TCE), which already ruled at the beginning of the year that the elections had to be repeated due to irregularities in the first process.
Now, the TCE must return to study a new challenge against which Soteras has defended himself, accusing Isern of wanting to enter the Federation “at any price” in order to have access to “privileged information” that will help him “in his defense in the Soule case”, judicial procedure that studies a case of alleged corruption in the Spanish Federation and in which Isern has also testified as a witness. The president of the FCF assures that Isern “is trying at any price to have the Catalan Football Federation at his disposal to extract a series of privileged information that if he is not inside he cannot extract for his personal use”.
Isern was responsible for Infrastructures and the Federation Works Commission then chaired by Andreu SubÃes, charged in the Soule case for alleged embezzlement of funds that would have been used to renovate his private home and who is also investigating the alleged cost overruns in the works of some headquarters of the Catalan Federation.
Soteras assures that in these second elections all the indications of the Catalan Esport Tribunal were followed “scrupulouslyâ€: “We put the most qualified personnel of our Federation at the voting tables so that there would be no type of irregularityâ€. Isern accuses the current president of the FCF of falsifying dozens of notarial certificates, something that Soteras has flatly denied: “There is not a single falsified certificate, they have all gone through a notary. If I did it, we could say that I have falsified them, but I have not done it, a notary has done itâ€.
Lastly, Soteras lamented the damage to the Federation’s image: “A lot of harm is being done to Catalan football and the Catalan Football Federation”. And, although he is confident that the elections will not be repeated, he is willing to win again at the polls:
“The Tribunal Català de l’Esport has enough personality to know what it has to do, I am not the one who has to tell it, but these second elections have been carried out with complete scrupulousness and cleanliness. There shouldn’t be any problem, but if they have to be repeated, we’ll go vote again and we’ll win again.”
